Intro
Maybe you're twins. Maybe you are soulmates just finding each other. Maybe you're on a villain to ally story arc. The case seems to be you're a twofold. I have designer of the twofold class on to explain how two players can become the ultimate power duo.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Ian Abercrombie, aka Speep Games!
Speep: Hello.
Jon de Nor: Give us a introduction of who you are and also how you got into the Matt Colville/MCDM community.
Speep: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's awesome to get the chance to talk to you. I'm Ian Abercrombie. You in the MCDM community might have seen me floating around here as Speep or Speep Games. I am a writer, I'm an editor, I'm a designer. And in the MCDM community, I have contributed by creating the Twofold class, which is a player-facing class supplement designed for two separate players to sort of bounce off of one another and empower each other.
How did I get into MCDM? That's a great question. It feels so long ago now that like, maybe it's just receded into the annals history. But I started running Dungeons and Dragons in, I would say, 2015. So I was, like, I was a junior in high school at the time. I feel like back then, resources were shockingly few and far between for Dungeon Masters and Directors when it came to questions like, how is it best to build a villain for your campaign? Or like, what's the best way to prepare an adventure?
There were lots of resources that were like, how do you come up with ideas for adventures? Or like, what rules or rulesets should you take advantage of? But I don't, I can't speak for everybody, but I don't have an issue ideating. I don't have an issue coming up with campaign hooks, or coming up with interesting situations to put players into, or in some cases, a lot of people were sharing advice like, how do you get a group together? I was like, I don't, I don't need that. That's stuff is, you know, part and parcel of being a gamer and, like having relationships with people, having friendships with people.
What I did need was more of a theoretical lens, sort of teaching me how to question design choices and how to best align your group with what you're interested in running. Or questioning if what you're interested in running matters at all. Does it, does it not? Those are the sorts of questions that I feel like Matt Colville enticed me with the beginning of the Running the Game series. I liked hearing about, like, what we can learn from our tables and how choices that we make in designing and in running games affects our players' behaviors at the table. It's all very fascinating to me.
I, around that same time, was watching a lot of like, quote unquote celebrity GMs. Your Matt Mercers, your Brennan Lee Mulligans. Who are great, but I foolishly fell into the habit of looking at their behaviors at the table and going, how can I emulate this for my players? So that they can enjoy this experience, like, you know, say, Matt Mercer's players do. And I gravitated toward, the Running the Game series, because it was a source of insight that was descriptive and was explanatory and theoretical. And those were all things that like, I feel like I sorely needed.
So, like, you know, springboarding off of the Running the Game series, obviously, I was very excited when Strongholds and Followers and Kingdoms and Warfare were coming out. I was very excited to use that for my players, to offer those opportunities to them. And then naturally, when my players were not as interested in buying strongholds or temples as I wanted them to be, I sort of, you know, fell back on that, went back to running Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. And like a lot of people, I think I experienced, frustration with the lack of resources that the system has.
And it was like a godsend hearing about the — then, what was called "the MCDM RPG" — hearing, oh, there's a system that will ostensibly make my players feel like it's fun to play a roleplaying game again. (laughter) It's not annoying anymore. And so I was extremely excited about that. What I was even more excited about was the Designing the Game series that ran at the beginning of the, MCDM RPG run.
It was very cool to see the, inside baseball of Draw Steel, to follow the Patreon posts, to watch the crowdfunders come to fruition. It was awesome to see that, because I was like graduating at the time for being a forever GM to being a more experimental GM, running different sorts of systems. And now that Draw Steel is out and people are actually playing it, graduating from that to being a designer in my free time.
Jon de Nor: And speaking of designing in your free time, you mentioned the Twofold class, which is a class where two players take the same class and play two different characters, but they're also kind of bonded in certain ways.
Speep: Yeah. That's a nice and succinct way of putting a pretty niche idea, I feel like. But a niche idea that, clearly, at least a handful of people, were interested in. I ran the crowdfunder campaign...it was lucrative enough to be able to buy some really nice art from @toloma.draws.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. It's two players. They both pick the same class, but it is two separate characters, and their abilities interact with one another. They have a connection, they're able to empower each other with that connection. And interestingly, in the realm of, Draw Steel design, they share lots of resources. They share Heroic Resources, they share Recoveries, and they also share surges in the newest update of the Twofold.
So yeah, that's a pretty good explanation of it. I've been like...I have a list of fictional characters that I think embody the sort of Twofold story, because a lot of people go, "Wait, I don't get it." That's okay, because it is pretty niche. But the best one — this is one that we discovered in our last playtest — is Mario and Luigi. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Speep: A player — there's an ability that the Twofold has — the Twin Twofold, one of the subclasses has — called Alley-Oop, where they're able to take a willing ally, or an unwilling creature, and they vertically force-move them a number of squares equal to their harmony pool that's shared between them. So if they're, like, charging up that harmony, they could, like, launch somebody, really, really far. And I had always thought of that as like, oh, this is this will be a really cool way to control the battlefield. Put your friend on the opposite side so they can come back and do a bunch of damage on the way back.
But my players emergently — and this is the exciting thing about design — they were like, oh, we're gonna throw like...I had them playing as my iconic heroes, Fara and Tall Hook. They were like, Tall Hook's gonna throw Fara really far up in the air, and she's gonna land on top of the enemy. And I was like, "Oh, my God, you guys are Mario and Luigi. It's awesome." (laughter)
So that's one. Hawk and Dove from DC Comics, Cloak and Dagger from Marvel Comics. Recently I thought, like, maybe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A very early touchstone in my tabletop identity-forming that I didn't even realize until recently is Vex and Vax from Critical Role. They are a rogue and a ranger, but, like, they're twins, and they, like, if their abilities were a little more connective, they might be Twofolds as well.
So, yeah, that's the Twofold. It's a class shared between two people. They bounce off of each other, they charge up their Heroic Resource when they're nearby, and then they spread out around the battlefield. It's very fun to watch happen in live action, as I've discovered in the playtesting phase.
Jon de Nor: Huh! I think the fact that they share some of the resources is...that's so interesting because, there is the Recoveries that are shared, which is kind of the same thing that the Beastheart does, except that Twofold has 18 recoveries, I saw, in the version that you sent me, which is an insane amount of Recoveries. (laughter)
Speep: It is. And honestly, they generate an insane amount of Heroic Resources. Well, it feels very strange, if you're well-acquainted with Draw Steel's design philosophy, it feels like a really big number, and it feels very scary as well. Like, if you're a Director, you're like, "What? You have how much? What?" But in play, you'll find that what ends up happening is these resources do get split pretty equitably between, the two Twofold units.
It's kind of exciting to see, like, oh, like...for instance, in one of my playtests, they were like, okay, only one of us is using Recoveries. The other one is just going to be dying for the entire combat. Like there are some interesting dynamics that happen with that, or situations where one player is intently focused on generating the Heroic Resource by creating flanking situations and creating adjacency situations with movement. And the other player is like, "Okay, I'm sitting on this and I'm putting myself in the position to where I can, you know, throw the monster 15 squares next time I act."
So there are, there are moments where, especially along the design phase where people ask me, "Don't you feel like this is too much Heroic Resource?" In play, I've had people go, "I don't have enough Heroic Resources. I don't know what I'm going to do. You need to up this amount." So it's an interesting and very different dynamic, with the resources shared between this class, that I personally — maybe there's something out there in the awesome Brewery Discord. But I haven't seen a lot of people play with resources in this way, so it's not surprising to me that it would initially be scary to players and directors like.
Jon de Nor: Okay, let me see if I understand the rules correctly, because you have these triggers that generate Heroic Resources, as you do with all classes. but they trigger for both characters individually, both contributing to the same pool. So to my mind that sounds like, oh, they generate resources at double the pace that any other class — or, not like any other class; they generate Heroic Resources at double the pace, but you could, in theory, just have one of them spending it all. And that sounds...I don't know! How do you balance that? (laughter)
Speep: You could, you could. The real answer is, the balance does not work out perfectly how you would want it to. And I think that is okay. I think that Draw Steel is a game where, very often, I'm running into things where I'm like, "This doesn't feel balanced. It feels too cool. I feel too powerful." And I think that's by design. I think that a lot of abilities are intentionally above-curve, so to speak.
And with the Twofold, it's essentially the same. Could you pop at an 11-harmony ability at double the speed that another player might pop their 11-focus or their 11-ferocity ability? Yeah, you could. It's very possible. But you would also be leaving your Twofold partner high and dry, and a lot of their abilities are based around shifting out of trouble, out of combat, putting themselves in better positions.
And if you pop that ability, there's a good chance that, you're not going to have the charge necessary to shift the spotlight back to the other partner, which is the other sort of core mechanic of the Twofold. They share a...I don't even know that I'd call it a metacurrency. They share something. They share a condition called "spotlight" that they can use harmony to shift between them. They can take it back from their partner. They can give it to their partner. And if you don't have harmony to do that, you won't be shifting the spotlight, your spotlight, making every single ability that you have quite a bit stronger.
There are times where a ability might say, without spotlight, that it does a certain amount of damage, but with spotlight, and you're like, "Oh, this is below-curve, why would I pick this ability? But with spotlight, it's like, "Oh, if I have the spotlight, I can also make my partner use one of their heroic abilities as well."
The push-and-pull of this is, the class is designed for both Twofolds to be using abilities. If a Twofold decided that they were going to just like spend it all up, that's totally okay, and facilitated by the design. But it is a little punishing, both for you and for your partner, who might not be able to help you next turn if you spend all your harmony.
Pretty cool. Yeah, it sounds strange, but it's one of those things that has worked out really well in playtests so far. Like I mentioned before, a lot of the time, the issue is actually the reverse of what you might think it is, where you look at it, you go, "Wow, the pace of this is crazy. They're going to be able to do these high-damage abilities very early in the combat." But in reality, what ends up happening is players go, "Oh, I might not have enough harmony to do the thing that I want to do. I've been shifting the spotlight around too much." But it's cool regardless. You know, it all comes out in the wash.
Jon de Nor: I also do wonder, when you've got two players playing the same class like this, have you butted up against the players feeling like their characters are too similar?
Speep: In the first iteration of playtesting, that was a major concern. What ended up happening after the first iteration was, there is a diversity of builds that's insisted upon in the design of the class. So certain heroic ability options say you must choose different options. That's part of it. It can be a little limiting in that way, but luckily, not all of the abilities say that. Some of them, you can mix and match however you want.
For instance, the kit for the Twofold actually says, you must choose a different kit than your partner. And I feel like kits are designed in such a way that even a class with the same subclass, two Furies with the same subclass with different kits might play very differently in Draw Steel. Same thing with the Twofold. Different kits are insisted upon, different abilities are tested upon.
And it ends up in such a way that the abilities — I intended on none of the abilities feeling the same as another ability. Whether or not that was successful, yet to be seen. In certain playtests, I've had to cleave off abilities that I felt like weren't pulling their weight for the class, and replace them with other, more diverse abilities, with the intention of no two Twofolds feeling like they're doing the same thing nonstop. Instead, I've designed the abilities so that if you take one ability, usually the other ability capitalizes off of that ability in some way.
So for instance, if you take an ability that allows you to have an effect from flanking, like, "Oh, I really want to flank," your Twofold partner might have an ability that's like, "Okay, well, then I will be, I will use my ability to put us flanking, I will use my ability to move us around." It creates this fun situation where — I was very, very happy to see this — when I ran it in a playtest, first time, there was a lot of like, I don't know, friction between the Twofold players about what they should do, what they shouldn't do, when they should use spotlight, when they shouldn't use spotlight.
But after some changes, what I found — this might be an issue in and of itself — but what I found was that the two Twofold players were sitting on one side of the table, and they were just constantly strategizing with each other, like literally the entire combat, they were going back and forth: "Oh, should we do this? If I put you here, we'll get more of our harmony, but I won't be able to use this ability. And if I use this ability —" Like, just nonstop, which I feel like is really cool for a Draw Steel game. Like, if you're getting that much interaction, it can't be an all-bad thing.
I am a little afraid, though, that, since most people do play this game on a virtual tabletop, I'm wondering, like, is this going to turn into a situation where they are just, like, quietly talking in the voice channel to one another? Or are they going to be text chatting? I think I'm okay with that, though. I think that this is an intended effect of the class. I don't know if you've got this, but in the class, it actually says, please sit next to your Twofold partner. (laughter) There's also one ability that says, when you switch places, you should switch places at the table.
Jon de Nor: I noticed that, that multiple times you mentioned, like, the physical locations of the players in the class. (laughter)
Speep: Yeah, yeah. It's gotta be important. I played most of my games in person, and I feel like that has a big impact on the way that I feel about tabletop roleplaying. In Flee, Mortals, there's Indix, the devil, and he's got an ability that makes you switch your abilities and character sheets with other players at the table, in Fifth Edition, which sounds really cool and interesting, like, "Ooh, he's like, you know, Freaky Friday-ing you."
And when I ran this in person, people loved it. It was the coolest thing ever. They were like, "I don't even know what's going on this barbarian's sheet. I gotta learn all this stuff now that my friends are doing this whole game." But then when I ran it online, it was just a catastrophe. It was terrible. I was like, "Okay, now I gotta assign all these character sheets on Roll20 to different people." And they were like, just so confused and so lost on it. And it made me realize, like, there is such a stark difference between in-person and online play.
And I don't really feel too terrible about saying the Twofold plays a little bit better at the physical table. That's totally okay with me. I think it plays wonderfully and perfectly fine online as well. I've playtested it there as well. But I do think, you know, there's a little tiny bit of something that gets lost if you're not, like, actually sitting at the table next to each other.
Jon de Nor: I will say that if there ever was a TTRPG that encourages being...like, having a strong idea and flavor, it's Draw Steel, where...yeah, this class has its own quirks, but it's a bit different, and I think Draw Steel, and by extension, its community, is something that welcomes something that feels a bit different, because it can.
Speep: Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. A good example of this is...there's a very, vocal minority of Draw Steel players who are really frustrated that the Fury gets a bunch of magical options as it levels, right? I see this criticism pop up sometimes where people are like, "Why is there no fighter in Draw Steel? Why is there no...why is everything magical? If I want to play a fighter, I shouldn't have to play Tactician." Like that sort of mentality. And I think that's very understandable, and it opens up some realm for design. Like, I'm thinking of the Knight, third-party. Very, very cool, and I'm glad that I'm glad that somebody is making it.
I think that...I'm not too pressed about disappointing somebody who wants something very specific and traditional out of a class. I'm totally okay with more classes being more niche and having, like...here's a good reason for this, is, when I first released the preview for the Twofold, something blew my mind, where somebody reached out to me within a day of me posting it and said, "Oh my God, two of my players at my table are Twofolds. They just don't know it. And so I gotta give this to them."
And I was like, that is incredible. I could have never expected that that would happen. Like in my mind, I was like, "Oh, this is just something I've invented. Like, this is something that doesn't exist out there in the world." And then over time I learned, wow, there's a lot of people playing twins at roleplaying tables. There's a lot of people playing lovers. There's a lot of people playing long-lost brothers. There's a lot of people playing a party of adventurers who have been revived from the dead, and these two, like, formed a connection in the afterlife. There's a lot of those people out there.
Knowing that this is, in fact, serving some people's fantasies — and for other people, maybe it's creating a sort of fantasy — that's really enjoyable to me because it's like, I don't know...like, what's the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer, if D&D didn't...? It doesn't, it's not real. Like, this is something that's —
Jon de Nor: Something that they started. (laughter)
Speep: Yeah. Like, it's totally contrived. Sorry to sorry to Stranger Things season five, but it's totally contrived. Does not exist. It was invented — you know, it's like Boba Fett. It was invented to sell you toys. And like, it's okay to make toys that don't look like — it's okay to make the Boba Fett toy. It doesn't look like anything else. It's cool, right? People want it, whether they know it or not.
Jon de Nor: That kind of leads me into the subclasses, which you call "bondkinds", which is the way that...or, explain both the names of the subclasses, and also — they feel very distinct from each other, at least when I read them.
Speep: I hope so. That was the plan. The bondkinds are the various ways that Twofolds can have become connected with one another. In the case of the Twin, which is, sort of the prototypical Twofold, in my opinion, the Twin is a set of individuals who were literally born together, right? Whether that means, like, they were born in the same womb, like, they're literally siblings, or whether that means they're connected from birth, that's kind of up for interpretation. But yeah, the Twins are my subclass that's based around high-octane self- and ally-movement abilities. Like, for instance, throwing your partner across the battlefield.
The Entwined is my subclass that's like, oh, destiny has brought you together. So in my mind, it supports two common fantasies. One of them being, we are lovers; one of them being, we are rivals, we hate each other. So I tried my best to turn this into a subclass that supported affecting your teammates, buffing your allies, debuffing enemies, with the power of your bond and relationship. So for instance, they have a triggered action that makes it so that when an ally between the two of them gets hit, takes damage, they can disperse the damage evenly among the three of them. So between the two Entwined and the one ally in the middle.
And then the third option. So we've got Vex and Vax, we've got Romeo and Juliet. The third one is a little more niche, and this is one that I was like, "This would be cool if it existed." Maybe it does. Maybe somebody will, point out some, like, fictional analogs to this, but the third one is the Twiceborne, which are two people who were raised from the dead, together. Maybe they were buried in a cemetery next to each other. Maybe they were party members, siblings, lovers, whatever, in a past life. But now, their bodies raise from the dead and seek to inflict vengeance and fear upon people using the overwhelming number of their bonds.
So these Twiceborne, I think of them as being dual Frankenstein. They will just cause insane amounts of the frightened condition on the battlefield, and then they capitalize off of that. So, one thing that they could do is they can spread out, shift a great distance, incorporeally pass through enemies, and cause them fright. One thing that they can do is — this is probably my favorite of these — is they can just, like, rip out the heart of their enemies. One of their 11-harmony abilities is, effectively, one of them grabs the enemy, the other one reaches into their chest and grabs their beating heart, pulls it out, and the enemy has only a certain amount of time before they die, if they don't get their heart back in them.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Yes! I love this.
Speep: Lots of cool stuff with the Twofold. Not all of it is, like, perfectly in line with what you might expect from the two-person archetype. Some of it, you will find in play, activates that in a very emergent and fascinating way. For example, an ability where you can uppercut an enemy. They are vertically pushed straight up in the air, and your ally teleports to them and uses a signature ability. So they take the fall damage, they take the signature ability damage, and your ally lands safely next to you. Lots of cool stuff there
I'm very excited by the subclasses. They're, like...I would say the thing that I learned the most throughout the development of the Twofold and what I will definitely be pulling forward with me into future design projects is so much of your class is determined by decisions you make building the subclasses when you're writing level 1? I think, if I could go back in time and redo the Twofold, without the investment of time, energy, and money that's been put into it yet, I would go back and I would rework what I was doing at level 1 with the subclasses.
Jon de Nor: Interesting.
Speep: Absolutely. And I think that — in fairness, I don't think all subclasses are built equivalent in Draw Steel. I think that, for instance, I saw somebody bring up in the homebrew Discord recently that the Shadow subclasses feel exceptionally different from one another. Whereas the Tactician subclasses, they're...you're still a Tactician first and foremost. There's differences, it's kind of a different playstyle, but it does feel like you're tacking on a different flavor to the things you're already doing, whereas the Shadow like completely changes your sort of playstyle.
I feel like where the Twofold fits into that is...I think it's closer to the Shadow. I think these three subclasses are meant to be played very differently. And with that, I almost want to say...this is a crazy thing to say about a class, but I almost want to say I don't want to spoil this. Like I want people to discover how these subclasses play differently in action, rather than telling you, like, here's what you do. You know?
Jon de Nor: Yeah. I was looking through the document dissent, which is a already has like a nice layout. I don't know how close to finished this is, but it looks really good already.
Speep: Thank you, thank you. That was the other thing I had to learn, was layout design. It might surprise — this is maybe valuable for other people to hear in the MCDM community. Hire a layout designer. (laughter) It is hard. And as somebody with — I would consider myself to be pretty artistic. I would consider myself to be relatively tech savvy. I would consider myself to have a good eye for design. It is not as easy as it seems like it is. I was so overconfident when it came to layout design. So if you got the money to spend, throw it at a layout designer. Make somebody's day, give somebody some support, and they'll do some good stuff for you.
Jon de Nor: And looking through it, I was also looking at the art. You already have a bunch of art in here, and it's so good. I love the art in this. I love the art style and the way...I love everything about it. (laughter)
Speep: It's really cool. It's so much cooler than I could have ever expected it to be. The artist that I found, @toloma.draws, he is killer. He's extremely good. So good that, like, I don't know, a part of me — maybe this is like, overconfidence in the product, but part of me is wondering, like, I wonder why nobody has, you know, poached him. He's awesome! So much of this stuff, like, my favorite piece of artwork in the project is...I'm trying to see what page of the preview it's on, but it is the piece of art where Tall Hook is sort of punching and Fara is behind him, sort of shadowboxing him, like controlling his body, in a spectral form. So cool!
Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speep: So, so cool. People have described this, independently from one another. as being, a reverse JoJo Stand, which is a really awesome way of looking at it. The two-folk at the end, the ancestry —
Jon de Nor: Yes!
Speep: He just looks so cool, so inviting. So if I were a player, I would see this in an ancestry book and go,"That's me. That's my guy."
Jon de Nor: Yeah, I scrolled — I got to the bottom of the document and suddenly I'm like, "What? What is this? An ancestry, that's unexpected?" I don't know if it was mentioned in the campaign, but I didn't realize that it was in here.
Speep: It was, but I was kind of, like, maybe noncommittal about it. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: But this piece of art is so good. And it also had a really interesting trait, the Nine Lives trait. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but they — at least the art of the two-folk is very cat-like.
Speep: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Tall Hook, the iconic hero, is...he's a two-folk. He's a cat guy. He's a panther man. And he's sort of the counterpart to Fara, who is a little human woman. In my fiction for them, they are, they met in the Two-Lands, which are these jungly desert lands. It's like a weird amalgam between a rainforest and a desert. And the two-folk, these feline humanoids, are the guides to this land. You cannot pass through Two-Lands without finding a two-folk.
But the catch is, maybe to differentiate them from wode elves in their wodes, two-folk are really happy to escort you through the Two-Lands. It's something that they love doing. TheIr culture is dependent on hospitality and togetherness. So yeah, that's Tall Hook in a nutshell. He's a cool, muscular, shirtless, ripped, awesome panther guy.
Jon de Nor: I will say that that piece of art for the — it was used in the campaign, but also here as a cover, with the two of them. So cool.
Speep: It's insanely good. Toloma, he did such a good job of, like...there's this dynamic action in these in these artworks that, like — I'm gonna be honest with you. Like I said earlier in my overconfidence spiel, I think I do have a good eye for these things, but like, I didn't tell him to do that. (laughter) He brought his own dynamism to the art that is incredible and unexpected. I'm thinking of the art for the Entwined subclass a little later on, which has these two characters fighting a bunch of shadow people all around them. And one of them is like, bounding off of the back of the other one, and they're both slashing their swords. It's so, so incredibly cool to see what he was able to come up with based on the notes that I gave him, but also just based on his own, like, creative sense and instincts. It's incredible. I could not have asked for a better artist.
Jon de Nor: And speaking of the two-folk, they...you get four points to spend on purchasable traits, because you have one that costs three. That's called Nine Lives, which I — it's so cool. (laughter)
Speep: Yeah, so — I think I put this out for preview at some point, so I feel comfortable like, you know, just spilling about it because it's awesome. It's like, maybe the best idea I had for them. Because, I don't know if you've noticed this, but the Pperfect Landing trait, it's not too — and the Catwalk trait — they're not too distinct from some of the stuff that MCDM put out in their "How to make an ancestry" Patreon test.
And so I was like, "I gotta do something that really sets this apart or else, like, why would anybody play one of these?" So I made Nine Lives, which is, while you're dying, you make your Stamina value 1. It's a maneuver. And once you use this ability, you cannot use it again until you respite. After using this ability nine times, it permanently becomes Afraid of Death, which is a slightly less useful version of itself; while you're dying, you may spend 1 Heroic Resource and gain 9 Stamina, but that might not take you out of the negatives if you're really dying.
I thought of this — I wanted to go so much further with this. I wanted to go full on, Puss in Boots and, like, bring in an element where it's like, okay, if you have Afraid of Death, every time you use this, somebody comes to hunt you down. (laughter) I didn't go that far, because I feel like that's maybe delving into the Complications territory. But, like, you know, hey, if you're a Director and you have a two-folk, feel free to use that. That one's for free. That one's on me.
Jon de Nor: I also noticed one...which one was it? I made specifically a note about it. Yeah, it's a level 3 feature called Interlinked, where, at the start of an encounter, you pool the Stamina of both Twofold, and then distribute it between them as you wish.
Speep: Oh, I was just thinking, like, the connection between these guys is supposed to feel really mystical. And you'll find that I do a lot of stuff with the — I tried to push the resource-sharing mechanics as far as I possibly could. So for instance, another example of an ability like this is the Twiceborne has an ability, very late in levels, that says if you die, if you hit zero — or sorry, negative winded value — you don't die until your until your other Twiceborne dies as well.
I wanted to make these shared resources feel very connective, almost like you are playing one character together. And I also wanted to take things that aren't necessarily resources and sort of turn them into resources together. So, dying, for instance, that's not a resource, but if I can make these guys share it, I will, right? A couple instances of that. Interlinked is a good example. I was kind of thinking, like, how many Draw Steel encounters have I run where players are running very low on Recoveries, or for some reason don't want to use their Recoveries between encounters, for whatever reason. They're still hurting really badly. And I was like, it's pretty often, it happens a lot.
I think that what I was thinking in this moment was, what if you're full? What if Fara is full on Stamina? What if she's good, but she's at 0 Recoveries? You're collectively at 0 Recoveries, and Tall Hook is like, he's got, you know, 2 Stamina. I want Fara to be able to go, like, "I want to give you my strength, so that we can push on." This stuff is, it's really exciting for me. Another like shared quote-unquote "resource", shared attribute, that the Twofold gets at level 4, is they get +1 speed if they're moving toward one another at the beginning of their movement. That's just another example of like me trying to like leverage Draw Steel's rules against the fact that there are two people. Things that you wouldn't typically share are now shared.
Even in the case of the Match Made ability, or triggered action, or...much later, I think it's the Thousandfold Push ability. Both of those leverage Malice as a connective resource as well. Yeah, I guess my philosophy there was just like, how many things can I connect? How many things can I get to proc off of one another for these Twofolds so that they really feel like they are the masters of connection, they're the masters of the bond?
Jon de Nor: This is kind of circling back to something we talked about a bit earlier, and how you mention in the class about sitting beside each other when you play and switching places with the ability that makes your characters switch places, and your players should also do the same. But you have this section called Bicameral Class, where you talk a bit about how you expect the class to be played, and you also specifically say that, if you are not the kind of person that want to play in tandem with someone else, this is not the class for you. And you kind of bid them adieu. (laughter)
Speep: Yeah. I think that this concession happens implicitly with a lot of classes. Like, for instance, when I play a roleplaying game, I'm not the type of player who, like, I don't want to deal with potencies. I don't want to think about 'em, right? So if I see a class that has a lot of abilities that circle around potencies, I might just avoid it, right? That's okay with me. Even if I lose out on some sort of fantasy.
In the case of the Summoner or the Beastheart, these master classes that MCDM has, their sort of disclaimer was, "Hey, you shouldn't play these until you've already played Draw Steel a little bit, and have a handle on the rules and a handle on what you should do and how you should do things." And I think that concession is made because the classes are pretty complex. They have a lot of moving parts. The Summoner relies on understanding the minion rules. Beastheart relies around you having a pretty in-depth understanding of the action economy.
In the case of the Twofold, I don't necessarily know that you need this complex understanding of the class — or, sorry, of the game, I should say. Instead, I think what you need is to feel comfortable sharing with another player. I don't think that is representative of every player at a table. There are classes designed with very little interaction with other classes. There are classes that are designed with a lot of interaction with other classes. I think this one is basically just asking you, "Hey, do you have a player that you're comfortable sharing resources with? Do you have a player that you're comfortable strategizing with? If you do, this class is for you. If you don't, that's okay too. It's just not for you. There's a lot of other classes. There's a lot of first-party and third-party classes that don't share two people."
So I'm okay with the potential that this class is not for everybody. One piece of concern that somebody raised very early in the design process was like, when would you ever want an ability that is reliant on another player's action to become useful? And I was like, well, if you were a Twofold, you would want that all the time. (laughter) But you're not, right? You're a Tactician. You want to tell other people how to do stuff. You know, you're an Elementalist, you want to put down a persistent AoE effect. You're not a Twofold. You don't want to...
For instance, a really exciting and cool ability is, force-moving an enemy, and if they slam into your ally, your ally gets to force-move them back. It's like a ping pong machine. That's really cool, but some people might look at that and go, "Oh, this is so situational. I would never want to strategize with another player about it." I think I'm like, I want to. That sounds exciting to me. But, you know, different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Jon de Nor: We're coming close to the end. But I'm going to ask one question that was submitted by one of my patrons, which was specifically about the crowdfunding campaign and whether or not you have any experiences from running the campaign that you feel like taught you something. And maybe if you have any tips or tricks, I guess, to anyone else who wants to run a crowdfunder for a class, or maybe just in general.
Speep: Yeah, I think that I learned a lot. I think it would be reductive to say that I learned one thing that spelled my success. Because, to be honest with you — I think this is the case with a lot of people running crowdfunding campaigns. I did not, I was not sure that I was going to fund. There was never a point, even until the last stretch of the campaign, where I was thinking, "Oh my God, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it. I know I'm gonna make it." There was a lot of doubt and uncertainty about it.
But a few pieces of advice that I learned along the way that I think were very valuable...one of them was being realistic about how much money people are willing to spend on a product. If you are realistic about that, you can compare that to the amount of money that you think you might need to produce the product; how much money you think you want to spend on art; how much money you want to spend on assets, layout design; how much, if you're this type of person, if you're making enough bank off of your crowdfunding campaigns, how much money you want to pay yourself, you know?
These are numbers that are important, and it's important to compare that with, like, other crowdfunding campaigns in the past, how much money they have made, what they charged, failed crowdfunding campaigns, how much money they charged or didn't charge. Those were questions that I was asking myself along the way. And also, how realistic am I going to be about art? How much art do I want to buy? I'm a little sad and disappointed I can't have more art for the Twofold, but it was realistic, the amount that I got.
Those were all very important and useful, sort of, pieces of wisdom that I picked up along the way. The piece of wisdom that I didn't pick up along the way, that I will take forward with me into future crowdfunding campaigns or future projects, is being realistic with yourself about a timeline. Playtesting takes forever. Takes so long. Especially if you're like me and you mostly do your playtests in person, getting a group of people together to give you feedback on something, it's a difficult thing to do.
Another aspect about this that I didn't even think about was there were some playtests that I just, like, invalidated. I was like, no, I didn't get enough productive information from this. Whether it was because of technical errors or whether it was because, you know, in some cases, there are things that happen outside of your control. Like what if a player just reads their ability wrong? Does that mean that you wrote it wrong? Does that mean it was unclear? Maybe, but not necessarily. And in cases like that, I'm like, okay, well, we just had a four-hour playtesting session. We might just need to throw this out, you know? Which means you need to schedule another for our playtesting session.
So being more realistic about a timeline...I feel an immense amount of guilt that I haven't gotten the Twofold out faster because there are people who really want to play it, and who are relying on this playtesting to bring it to a polished state. So that would be my biggest piece of advice is don't make the same mistake I made. Give yourself lots of time. Be transparent with both your patrons and also just people who are interested in, picking up the class. And don't put too much on your plate. Don't overdo it, as far as what you think you're capable of designing. As much as I would love to have a list of complications, magic items, an adventure, and monsters all themed around the Twofold, I don't think that's happening. I don't think that's coming to fruition. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: I also ask all my guests to bring a some kind of recommendation. Anything they want my listeners to check out or be aware of. So what have you brought?
Speep: Yeah, I have, two and a half, or three, recommendations of media. The first one is something that you've probably heard of and has probably made its rounds on the internet enough to where everybody's interfaced with it. But if you haven't seen the television show Andor, you need to watch Andor. It is politically prescient. It is interesting. It is action-packed. It's dramatic. It's romantic. It's amazing. It looks good. It sounds good. Every performance is as good as it could possibly be. It's tight, it's perfect.
And a lot of people will go, "Yeah, but I just don't really like Star Wars," so much that it's become a meme to say, "No, no, no, you gotta watch it! It doesn't matter if you like Star Wars or not!" But it's a meme because it's true. It might be the best television show ever made, in my opinion. It's really good. It will give you a lot of fuel for your roleplaying games that have a lot of intrigue in them. If you run a Draw Steel game that involves any sort of subterfuge, any sort of intrigue, watch Andor. If you live in a country where the forces of evil are coming down upon your head at any given time with an increasing rate, watch Andor, I think it will open your eyes to some sort of bigger questions about life.
And then the second and, second-and-a-half recommendations, are the video game Dwarf Fortress, originally released in 2006. It's been in development, and it probably will be in development until, you know, until I'm dead, if I had to guess. It is an intense simulation game. I've heard people describe it as "pinky toe" simulation because, when your dwarves get into combat, it is simulated down to the pinky bone. If you are fighting a gnoll, the gnoll might, like, his appendix might burst, or you might chop off his third toe or something. It's really cool.
It's impressive because...I described it as a game, and I think a lot of people would say it's a video game, but like, it's in art museums because the simulation is so credible, so emergent, so fascinating, that it begins like it almost becomes more fun the less you're trying to win. You learn more about your dwarves, you sort of form an emergent story in your mind about them and about your fortress. Your relationship with the world as its like, you know, overseer, as its god, impacts a little bit about the dwarves, but they also impact a little bit about what you do, if you're being receptive to the simulation.
But the real reason why I bring this up is, the soundtrack that I am playing at any given time during a Draw Steel session, unless it's a high-octane combat encounter, is Dabu's Dwarf Fortress soundtrack. It is so good, so atmospheric. It's got this, I don't know, like, fantastic, but also very rustic feeling to it that I really appreciate having when my players are just like planning things, talking about things, traveling, doing low-intensity montages, downtime projects, that sort of thing. So Dabu's Dwarf Fortress, it's a great recommendation for ambient soundtrack during your game.
Jon de Nor: Two very different recommendations. I love! (laughter)
Speep: Yeah, definitely. I thought like, man, I have to have a couple, because one just wouldn't tell the whole story, you know?
Jon de Nor: It has been a delight to have you on. And I remember seeing the original crowdfunder and not really being sure if I knew if the Twofold would be interesting, but now, having sat down and actually read through the class and having you talk about it, it's so — I really want to play. (laughter)
Speep: Oh that's awesome. Let's get together. Let's play a Twofold unit at some point.
Jon de Nor: That would have been awesome. That would be awesome. (laughter) But yeah, thank you so much for coming on and talking about the Twofold. This has been an eye-opener. (laughter)
Speep: Awesome. I love to hear it. I love to be opening eyes.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming on Ian. The twofold introduces such a novel way to play the game. No other class have you working as closely together with another player. And with the shared resource pools, you have the flexibility to pull off some impressive feats.
I want to thank FoxTrick for submitting questions for Ian.
If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on tips@goblinpoints.com.
Links to everything, including this script can be found in the show notes, and on goblinpoints.com.
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Next episode is on the 5th. That's going to be the news episode for July, and an exciting update from me. Fingers crossed.
See you next time. Snakkes.